SWKotOR poor performance on E6600 system

[Mackle]

Tried running this on my Fathers new PC (E6600, ATi X1650) and I was surprised at how choppy the game seemed to run when going through things like smoke on the Endar Spire in the opening part of the game. It really slows down quite badly, best examples so far are the bit just after you encounter the first two Sith - a droid gets blown up in a smokey corner and that effect absoloutely crawls on this machine - and the cutseen that soon followes where a grenade gets thrown that takes out a couple of republic soldiers and a Sith, this cut scene stutters badly during the bits with smoke and explosion effects.


This is with the AA at 6 (wouldn't let me pick 8, even though the X1650 is a much newer card than the game) and AF set to 16, frame buffer on, soft shadows off, V-sync off, and a resolution of 1280x1024.

I would of thought that a PC of that spec would of been able to run this game with all the details on in a good screen resolution.

Have tried turning one of the cores off using the "set affinity" option in task manager, doesn't seem to make a difference.

Catalyst version is the latest off the ATi site, freshly downloaded on NYE having uninstalled the previous ones.

There is no anti-virus software running in the background whilst playing this game, CPU utilisation is 0% before running it, 50% during, and hard drive has been defragged too.

The system also has the latest Microsoft dual core patch, which was released just before Christmas.


If the only way to run this game is with no AA and AF on this spec machine I'd be very dissappointed because it then would be running this game no better than my old P4 3.0 and ATi 9700.

 

[Wolfy]

Welll..... I remember when I played the game I had to reinstall an older driver for my 9800XT cos there was some issue back then with the game particularly on the grass plains level.

However, in your case your gfx card is pants. Turn off AA and AF and that should help some.

 

[insan3]

yes agreed, just turn down the AA some, and it should improve performance greatly.

 

[bfellow]

Since SW KOTOR uses the Bioware Aurora Engine that Neverwinter Nights uses, I believe the game might not know how to use dual-core systems effectively.

According to the Neverwinter Nights FAQ about dual-core systems, you run the game then go into Task Manager and find the .exe for the game running and change "Set Affinity" to only one of the CPUs to run the game.